Published: June 3, 1984

Chicago was halfway between the wilderness and the stock exchange. Every human aggression was closer to the writer's eye. Chicago was a concentrated force accessible enough to become a favorite subject of social criticism on the part of early realists like Henry Blake Fuller and Robert Herrick, transplanted Harvard poets and scholars at the new University of Chicago like William Vaughn Moody and Robert Morss Lovett, tough- talking ''literary'' reporters from Carl Sandburg to Ben Hecht. Much of Thorstein Veblen's ''The Theory of the Leisure Class'' (1899), with key terms for the appetites of the new rich like ''conspicuous consumption,'' was documented from Chicago. The new science of sociology, often based on the immigrants' settling into their separate ethnic wards, found brilliant exponents at the university founded on Rockefeller money. The sardonic criticism of American wealth and its manners that was to fill early twentieth-century fiction also found its grim material in the Haymarket affair, the stockyards, the meat-processing jungle, the terrible winters and sometimes even more terrible police. Nowhere but in Chicago would a millionaire (Levi Leiter) have offered to buy the Great Wall of China. As Others See Us

The last chapter of the late Luigi Barzini's study ''The Europeans,'' which has just been brought out in paperback by Penguin, is devoted to European perceptions of America.

Nobody is, in reality, excessively perturbed by the Americans' contradictions, their public and official insistence on sincerity, purity, and virtue, their contempt of cynicism, their faith in their own excellence, in progress, in the endless perfectibility of man - all traits occasionally and embarrassingly in contrast with their behavior. Nobody is perturbed overmuch by their need tirelessly to tinker, improve everything and everybody, never leave anything alone, or by their belief that new is always better, that there is (or should be) magic power in treaties and legal documents and international organizations, or by their contemptuous disregard for history, for other people's precedents and errors. These are things one can live with. Even if they are ineradicable American characteristics, they are not exclusively American. Who does not want to see oppression, poverty, hunger, injustice defeated, treaties honored, and war really outlawed? What country's rhetoric is not at times in contrast with its conduct? What really frightens foreigners, Europeans in particular, and makes them worry about the future is something else, the one characteristic that really makes the United States a world apart, a truly different country, one that it is difficult to work with, risky to rely on and trust one's future to. This is America's impatience. To Have and to Hold

In her history of courtship in America, ''Hands and Hearts'' (Basic Books), Ellen K. Rothman records that by the 1870's exhibiting presents ''for the public gaze'' was a common feature of middle- class weddings. The custom was not universally approved, however, and some of its critics went even further.

The popular magazine Godey's Lady's Book objected not just to wedding presents being displayed, but to their being given at all. In March 1870, the editors lauded couples who had ''No Presents Received'' engraved on their wedding cards, although three years later they were forced to report that cards had appeared with ''No Plate Ware'' printed in the corner. Out in the Pasture

A passage from ''Three Horses,'' one of the poems in Tom Sleigh's collection ''After One'' (Houghton Mifflin.)

Out in the pasture, in the clear twilight, They move through the breast-high alfalfa. Their broad backs gleam. The mare canters, then

trots, Her two daughters close behind. She slows, paws The dust that rises to her fetlock, While the others stretch their legs to a gallop, Their paths veering off, as all three, separate, Walk in the velvet softness of their shadows. Their tails brush away the winged voices In the dark, their ears twitch, their nostrils flare And wrinkle. The soft muzzles lower to graze. The silhouetted curves of their necks disappear, Then arc up above the green.

The Clanging of a Bell

In his biographical study of his father, ''H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life'' (Random House), Anthony West gives an account of how the young Wells, who was already describing himself as a socialist, set out to learn more about the implications of his belief.

It was in the hope of finding a shortcut to a fuller understanding of what he was committing himself to that he began to attend the gatherings that were taking place every Sunday evening through the winter months of the middle eighties in William Morris' boathouse beside the Thames just above Hammersmith Bridge. . . . What my father got from the sessions was a sense that socialism was something coming from abroad that was mixed up with a great deal of locally generated stuff about getting back to an England of happy peasants and contented craftsmen . . . Morris hadn't struck him as much more impressive than the boathouse message - he had seemed, in fact, to be short-tempered and something of a bully. When he took the chair at the meetings he used to silence speakers whose general drift he didn't care for by drowning them out with the clanging of a hand bell that he kept beside him for that purpose. This did n't seem quite the democratic thing to my father.B